sunday reading for invalids and idealists

First, Laila Lalami's incisive piece on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji in the Nation. I've heard both Ali and Manji speak in the last year, and came away disturbed in both cases for the same reasons Lalami elucidates. Although I found Manji more upsetting than Ali--she managed to be ignorant, arrogant, and insulting all at once.

Then this NYRoB review by Alan Ryan of the new books by Appiah, Sen, and Nussbaum, all of which are on my summer reading list (started the Appiah in Oxford, actually, while packing up my own books off R's shelves).

Kerem Öktem, a friend at St Antony's and co-organizer of the conference I just attended, has a very good article up at Middle East Report Online discussing the renewed tension in the Kurdish regions of Turkey and the ominous resurgence of right-wing Turkish nationalism that has been occuring in recent months.

The Village Voice praises Brooklyn's indie publishers. Verbal Privilege concurs: we [heart] Soft Skull and Archipelago in particular.

And finally, out of a string of several NYer articles I've loved and wanted to blog over the last few months (among them the profile of Pete Seeger and the essay on Syrian cinema) finally something I want to recommend is actually online: Adam Gopnik's essay on two new books about Robespierre and the Terror. For example, on:

what Robespierre represents: the ascent of the mass-murdering nerd—a man who, having read a book, resolves to kill all the people who don’t like it as much as he does. There is a case to be made that the real singularity of the Terror was the first appearance on the stage of history of this particular psychological type: not the tight-lipped inquisitor, alight with religious rage, but the small, fastidious intellectual, the man with an idea, the prototype of Lenin listening to his Beethoven as the Cheka begins its purges. In normal times, such men become college professors, or book reviewers or bloggers. It takes special historical circumstances for them to become killers: the removal of a ruling class without its replacement by a credible new one. In the confusion, their ethereal certainties look like the only solid thing to build on.

and on the duties of historians:

Even if we accept that the revolutionaries were not the only bloody-minded madmen in Europe, do we end our reading with a new sense of proportion? Whatever academic scholarship may insist, surely a sense of proportion is the last thing we want from history—perspective, certainly, but not proportion. Anything, after all, can be seen in proportion, shown to be no worse a crime than some other thing. Time and distance can’t help but give us a sense of proportion: it was long ago and far away and so what? What the great historians give us, instead, is a renewed sense of sorrow and anger and pity for history’s victims—for some luckless middle-aged Frenchman standing in the cold gray, shivering as he watches the members of his family being tied up and having their heads cut off. Read Gibbon on the destruction of the Alexandria library by the Christians, or E. P. Thompson on the Luddites—not to mention Robert Conquest on the Gulag—and suddenly old murders matter again; the glory of the work of these historians is that the right of the dead to have their pain and suffering taken seriously is being honored. It is not for history to supply us with a sense of history. Life always supplies us with a sense of history. It is for history to supply us with a sense of life.

I think there's more to our task than that; but this is surely a large part of what drew me to the field in the first place--reading histories with a sense of life. This is no doubt why I am currently trying to shoehorn some fragment of Hobsbawm into my summer syllabus.